Tyr smacked him across the snout with all of his strength. Ow. “Fucking pay attention!” he snapped. “I’m yelling at you!”
With a sigh, Zane Changed back into human form, clothes molding around his body as he did so. Unlike most other shifters, dragons had the ability to manifest clothing when they Changed to human form, instead of ending up naked like fools.
He’d changed his breaking and entering outfit for black jeans and a royal blue button-down shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. Black cowboy boots. He had a weakness for cowboy boots, though not for horses.
Dragons and horses definitely did not mix.
He’d added an unstructured black jacket instead of the combat vest—and felt something weighing down the pocket.
Blaze’s idol.
He closed his hand around it, feeling waves of cold darkness emanating from it. Once again, he heard a faint whispering.
He dropped his hand. Was the thing talking to him? That couldn’t be good.
“No. I didn’t get it, okay? It was a cluster fuck in there.” He’d been outmaneuvered by a human petty thief and a cat.
“How? What happened? How the hell did you manage to set off all the alarms? And what took you so long to get home? Are you—”
Zane cut him off before he could get to “okay.” “I said I didn’t get the Seal, all right? Now stop buzzing around like a mosquito, before I swat you.”
“Fine. See if I ever watch your back again.” Tyr stomped away and jumped off the edge of the roof to the balcony a story below, not even bothering with the wrought-iron spiral staircase.
Zane sighed. Tyr, he said quietly in his mind.
He felt his brother pause by the balcony doors. I’m pissed at you.
I know. I’m sorry. I’m a dick.
You’re a dragon-sized dick.
Despite his mood, Zane felt a half-smile curve his lips. That’s one damn big dick. Especially if it’s my dragon we’re talking about.
Tyr gave a mental snort. You mean mine, Peanut Wienus. He paused. What happened in there?
Zane shook his head, even though his brother couldn’t see him. Let’s go down to the Batcave and find Thorne. That way I only have to tell it once.
Chapter 8
As soon as the shock of the thief crashing out the window wore off, Blaze spoke the magic words that silenced the magical alarms. Her cell phone was already ringing—it was the private security company for the regular alarm system, wanting to know if everything was all right.
Everything was not all right.
She answered the phone and assured them that everything was fine. The alarm had been set off accidentally. No, they didn’t need to send an agent. She was just going back to bed.
Yeah, right. She hung up and ran down the hallway towards the gallery, heart in her throat.
She entered the code on the gallery door, ducking under the barred security gate as soon as it raised high enough. She could already see the lights on in the office, and the red lights flashing on the vault door.
She entered the override code, hands shaking, already knowing what she’d find.
The wooden box that had held the idol lay on the vault floor, open, the eyes carved on the lid staring up at her accusingly.
They’d come for the idol. After all these years, after all her precautions, they’d just walked in and taken it. Her coven had come.
She slid down to the floor, back against the wall.
Slowly, through her despair, logic began to seep through.
Whoever had broken into her house was a powerful sorcerer. He had to be—he’d jumped out a freaking window four stories in the air, for heaven’s sake, and flown away. That took an enormous amount of power. She didn’t know if even Silas could have done it.
But it hadn’t been Silas. Even with the mask, she would have known if it were Silas—she knew the feel of his magic as well as she knew her own. She couldn’t imagine it being anyone from the coven. That kiss. The things the thief made her feel, the images he’d made her see. Almost as if… as if they were memories.
His energy had felt strange. Alien. But she hadn’t felt the taint of evil.
It just didn’t make sense, unless it wasn’t the Silver Raven Coven at all.
Which meant someone else had come after the idol. But who? Who would even know she had it, except the coven? Had Silas hired someone to come after it? She couldn’t imagine him trusting anyone that much who wasn’t in his power.
Either way, it was out in the world now, its evil unprotected and unbound. Did whoever had taken it know what they were unleashing onto the world? Or were they just an opportunist, stealing magical artifacts for money?
For one moment, she was tempted to let it go. The idea of the burden she’d carried so long being lifted from her shoulders was almost intoxicating. If fate had taken the idol from her hands, then her responsibility was over.
Sadly, the moment didn’t last. That thing had taken her parents, her friends, everyone she’d loved. It had taken the life she should have had, and any chance at happiness.
She owed it to her family, her coven, the lost souls of the people she’d loved, not to let that happen to anyone else.
She had to get it back, whoever had it and whyever they’d taken it. And she had the means to do it.
Taking the box to her workroom, she laid it gently in the center of the table. She rubbed her fingers over it, coating them in the magical tracking dust that still clung to it.
The thief had triggered her trap. He had to be covered with the dust. He’d breathed it in, getting it into his lungs and into his bloodstream.
For one full cycle of the moon, she could find him anywhere. And she would.
She went over to one of the bookshelves and got a map of Portland and the surrounding area, spreading it out on the table. Then she took a pendulum from the tall wooden jewelry box on the shelf.
She sat down at the table, letting the pendulum dangle over the map. It was solid brass, formed into an upside-down teardrop shape with the point at the bottom. She held the thin brass chain loosely between her thumb and forefinger.
Blaze whispered the words of the spell, cleared her mind, and waited.
Gradually, the pendulum began to move. It pulled in a certain direction, dragging her hand over the map. Towards the river, and upwards to North Portland. It stopped over St. Johns, the small, friendly community between downtown and the commercial ports at the very northern tip of the city, where the Willamette and Columbia rivers met.
The pendulum swung in small, tight circles, until it came to rest over a single point on the map. Gradually, a holographic image bloomed in the air. An overhead street view, as though from a satellite photo.
Blaze put down the pendulum, grabbed her tablet off the table by the door, and pulled up the map function. She zoomed in until the computer image matched the magical one. An address came up. 11435 Maple Street. A small house, barely visible beneath the trees in the yard.
Blaze touched the screen, dropping an electronic pin in the map and sending it to her phone. There.
That was where her thief was now.
And tomorrow, she would go and find him.
Right now, she had a difficult, finicky, time-consuming window-repair spell to do.
Chapter 9
Rebel stood in the shower of her little rental house in St. Johns, scrubbing her arms with lye soap. Damn it, there had been some kind of dye pack in the box.
Who would have thought someone would have a fracking dye pack inside a box that was locked in their own fracking vault?
Although, it wasn’t exactly a dye pack. The red dust had lost its color on contact. But it had gone right through her clothes. She could still feel it on her skin, prickling her.
What the hell was it? Some kind of toxin? That would suck even worse than her botched burglary.
She scrubbed her forearms harder, angry. Rebel Smith never botched a job.
She’d ditched her clothes, leaving them in the woods
near where her car had been parked, changing into the spares she kept in the car. So if there was some kind of radioactive dust on her clothes, she wasn’t carrying it with her. But it wouldn’t fucking come off her skin.
Hell, it felt like it was percolating in her bloodstream. Fuck wizards and sorcerers and the goddamn horses they rode in on. Now she was probably going to wake up dead, as one of her foster brothers used to say when he was throwing-up-passing-out drunk.
Finally her skin stopped prickling and the residue washed down the drain. She hoped. She might have to pay some hedge witch to do a magical cleansing on her and hope whatever it was didn’t make her skin peel off in rotting strips in the meantime.
Rebel climbed out of the shower, wrapping a big bath sheet around herself and tucking the edges in.
She padded down the hall into her bedroom and stopped short.
Jack The Asshole Harper was sitting on her bed, with his goddamn Doc Martens on her goddamn bedspread. Fidgeting nervously with the chain around his neck, and looking strung out as all hell.
Rebel strode forward and shoved his feet off the bed.
“What the fuck are you doing here? Get out of my room!”
“The boss wants the artifact,” he said. “Like, now. You didn’t call in, and—”
“I’m supposed to call when I have it,” she interrupted. “I don’t.”
He stumbled to his feet, grabbing her arm with surprising strength for someone who looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week. Or showered, either, to judge by the smell.
He was sweating, his free hand clenching and unclenching, his fetid breath all up in her face. “What do you mean you don’t have it?” he demanded. “Jesus, Rebel! How could you fuck this up? I’m fucking dead. We’re both fucking dead. I told him you were the best…”
She was ready for his swing. She caught his fist in her palm, and then she flipped him over her hip and onto the floor. The breath huffed out of him with an audible ‘whoosh.’
“Keep your fucking hands off me,” she said. “And also, I am not having this discussion dressed in a towel.”
She went over to the dresser and pulled out some sweats, leaving him to push himself up into a sitting position, gasping for breath. Then she dropped the towel and started to get dressed.
For a second Jack’s eyes glazed over. Yeah. Keep looking, asshole. See what you’re missing. See what you fucked up by getting yourself hooked on magical crack.
Or maybe the glaze was just lack of oxygen.
She never should have gotten involved in this job.
She pulled on her sweatpants, commando. Jack was still sitting on the scarred wooden floor, skinny and pathetic, his eyes red-rimmed and his hands shaking. He sniffled.
Fucking sniffled. Like a five-year-old.
“Jeez, Rebel,” he whined. “If I don’t bring the boss what he wants, he won’t give me my next fix. You have to get that box. What the fuck happened?”
“What happened,” she said, pulling her sweatshirt over her head, “was that your boss didn’t bother to tell me that someone else is after the box too. They waited for me to break into the vault, and then they snuck up behind me and tried to take the box right out of my hands.”
Jack dropped his head into his hands. “No… fuck, no… this can’t be happening.”
“He also didn’t tell me that the thing was magically booby trapped. When I opened it to make sure it was the right piece…”
Jack’s head came up. “You opened it?”
She stared at him. “He told me to.”
Jack’s eyes were huge. “No way,” he said. “He told me not to open it. He told us both not to open it.” His voice dropped. “God, Rebel, you fucked this up so bad…”
That wasn’t possible. She could have sworn she’d heard the words ‘open the box.’ She’d been going over the instructions in her mind, and the words were reverberating in her brain, until she couldn’t not open it. Open the box. You must open the box…
Jack had his head in his hands again, moaning. “Shit, Rebel, he’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill us both.”
“Jack,” she said, trying to snap him out of it. “Jack!”
She didn’t know whether to smack the living shit out of him or feel sorry for him. He used to be a decent guy. A little greedy, a little weak, a lot on the wrong side of the law. But sweet and funny and good-looking, and he’d actually cared about her.
Once.
Until he’d discovered ‘magical crack’, some kind of high that only sorcerers could provide. Then, like any other addict, he stopped caring about anybody but himself and his habit. And anyone could use that weakness to make him do whatever they wanted.
When he came to her with this job, she hadn’t realized how strung-out he was. The boss must have been keeping him well-supplied.
Apparently, he was a fucking wreck.
“You have to go back and get it. Now.” Jack was staring at her intensely, struggling to his feet.
“Are you insane? I can’t go back there tonight. The alarms were going crazy. The cops are probably there right now.”
Jack was clutching the chain around his neck again. Rebel got a glimpse of some kind of amulet. He was sweating harder now, his eyes dilated until the color disappeared and all she could see were the pupils.
Which began glowing a dull red. Rebel stepped back. Holy hell.
Jack’s body twisted, and he grunted in pain.
Then a black crater the size of a fist opened in his chest.
A fucking hole in his chest.
Rebel backed up further, until her butt was against the dresser. She knew she should run, but she was frozen in place, staring at the abomination happening to her ex-boyfriend.
The hole grew deeper, emitting a deadly black fog. It seemed to go on and on, much further than the width of Jack’s body. Like a long dark tunnel heading into nowhere.
With a robed, hooded figure in the far distance.
The strange perspective made her dizzy. She didn’t move, but the mouth of the tunnel seemed to hurtle toward her, growing until it took up all her vision, and yet somehow it didn’t block out Jack’s body. Rebel’s stomach heaved from her brain’s inability to make sense of what she was seeing.
The hooded figure came closer and closer, until it was standing in the room.
Her visual perspective snapped back into place. A dark figure stood between her and Jack, the hood of his robe obscuring most of his face. Only the white gleam of his teeth showed, and his eyes. Deep and dark, almost invisible except for the faint flashes of red that showed every now and then when he moved his head.
The boss. She’d only met him once, and his face had been equally obscured. She had no clue what he really looked like.
Jack stood hunched over behind him, looking as if half his chest cavity was missing. Like this man had stolen away some of his substance and created his own body out of it.
Fuuuuck. She should never, ever have agreed to this job.
“Where is the artifact?” the sorcerer boomed.
His voice was deep, almost too deep to be human. Like something else was speaking through his mouth.
Hell, maybe it was.
Was he really here? Or was it a projection? Could he cast spells through it? She hoped not.
“There were problems,” Rebel said, keeping her voice steady. “The intel was faulty.”
She couldn’t see his expression, but she could tell it wasn’t pleasant. He was angry. And… something else.
Desperate, maybe. Like Jack.
Of course, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to kill her anyway. Desperate people were the most dangerous.
“We had an agreement,” he said. “You have failed. I was promised you were the one who would not fail.”
She couldn’t let him blame her. That would be deadly. First rule of survival in the jungle: the only way to deal with someone trying to intimidate you was to stand up to them.
He was a powerful sorcerer; even if he was a pro
jection, there was a fifty-fifty chance he could squash her like a bug. Her job was to make him forget that.
Rebel walked right up to him, getting in his face. “Yeah, we had a deal,” she said. “You would provide the intel. I would provide the expertise. You didn’t tell me the damn thing was magically protected. And, you didn’t tell me that someone else was after it.”
She saw his dark eyes flash red, his body language growing taut and angry. She could almost feel the storm in the air; the hair on the back of her neck stood up.
“Someone else? Who?” His voice was suddenly avid.
“I have no fucking idea. He got there just after I did and cornered me in the vault. He attacked me and made me drop the box. It set off some kind of an alarm.”
“You allowed someone to follow you there?” The sorcerer’s voice was low and dangerous. Behind him, Jack’s body twisted, and he let out an animal-like whimper.
It took all Rebel’s courage not to flinch.
She deliberately rolled her eyes. “Since I spent two hours waiting on the roof before I entered, and he wasn’t sitting next to me sharing his smokes, I would say no, he didn’t follow me. He got there on his own. He had a partner keeping a lookout, and they went in a completely different entrance. So what I want to know is, who leaked the job on your end? Because I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone.”
Not quite true. Her sister knew; Rebel had no secrets from Tempest. But she wasn’t drawing this psycho’s attention to her sister.
Instead, she went on, “I beat them to the vault. I had the box in my hand. The guy tried to grab me and knocked the box to the floor. The alarm went off, security doors started slamming shut, I ran.”
“Without the item?” He was looming over her now. She reached out her hand, fingers stiff, to poke him in the chest and make him back the hell off.
Her fingers sank into his chest and disappeared. Rebel pulled her hand back quickly and dropped it to her side, clenching her fist to make sure her fingers were still there.
At least she knew now. He was only a projection. That was a little comfort. Even if he could project spells through this manifestation, he wouldn’t have his full power. But that didn’t mean she was out of the woods yet.
Dragon's Rogue (Wild Dragons Book 1) Page 4
